Our legacy 32-bit root servers used the FreeBSD operating system. As with all
Unix and Unix-like operating systems, time and dates in FreeBSD are represented internally as
the number of seconds since the UNIX Epoch, which was the 1st of January 1970
GMT.

32-bit systems can only store a maximum of
231
non-negative seconds (2,147,483,648 seconds or about 68 years). Which means
that 32-bit UNIX systems won't be able to process time beyond 19 Jan 2038 at 3:14:07 AM
GMT.

All of our Unix product offerings use 64-bit architecture systems that can store
a maximium of
263
non-negative seconds (9,223,372,036,854,775,808 [9.2 Quintillion] seconds or about 292.27
Billion years), which is about 22 times the estimated age of our universe!

For the curious: A switch to 128-bit architecture systems would yield a maximum of
2127
non-negative seconds (170,141,183,460,469,231,731,687,303,715,884,105,728 [170 Undecillion]
seconds), or about 18.4 Quintillion times as many as 64-bit systems.

For the really curious: A switch to 256-bit architecture systems would yield a maximum of
2255
non-negative seconds (57,896,044,618,658,097,711,785,492,504,343,953,926,634,992,332,820,282,019,728,792,003,956,564,819,968 [57 Quattuorvigintillion]
seconds), or about 340 Undecillion times as many as 128-bit systems.

* For informational purposes only

As of
Sat May 25 16:15:50 GMT 2019 there are currently:

1,558,800,950 seconds since the UNIX epoch.

18 years, 7 months, and 24 days until 19 Jan 2038.

To give an indication if a Unix machine is 2038 Compliant, one can run
this perl script to see if the time is incremented correctly.